The Intercept Briefing

New York City is on the cusp of an election in which what once looked impossible has begun to seem inevitable. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist member of the New York state Assembly, is heavily favored to beat Andrew Cuomo, New York’s onetime Democratic governor and a former icon of the party establishment, in a race for mayor that has become among the most-watched in the nation.

Cuomo and Mamdani articulate two vastly different visions for New York City — and where the Democratic Party is going overall. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Akela Lacy speaks to people hoping to see each of those two visions fulfilled.

“Traditionally, we've thought about politics as left, right, and center,” says Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist who has worked on local and national campaigns. “Zohran offered a message that was less about ideology and more about disrupting a failed status quo that is working for almost no one.”

Cass, who worked on Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign in 2021, isn’t working for Mamdani but says his candidacy indicates “that Democrats can win when we have ideas.”

In the view of Jim Walden, a former mayoral candidate who is now backing Cuomo, those ideas are “dangerous and radical policies.” He says Mamdani’s popularity is an indication that “there's going to be a flirtation with socialism and maybe some populist push” among Democrats. 

But “ultimately,” Walden says, “the party will come back closer to the center.”

Chi Ossé, a City Council member who endorsed Mamdani, sees Mamdani’s success as evidence of the opposite. “We could have gone back to or continued this trend of electing centrist, moderate Democrats,” Ossé says. Instead, he thinks that New Yorkers want “someone who ran as a loud and proud democratic socialist who has always fought on the left.”

While New York City is preparing for a general election, Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is unlikely to win — turning the race almost into a second Democratic primary. “The party is now confronted with a choice,” said Lacy, “between a nominee who has become the new face of generational change in politics and a former governor fighting for his political comeback. The results could reveal where the party’s headed in next year’s midterms and beyond.”

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The first phase of the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal began to move forward this week as Israeli and Palestinian hostages have been released and aid trickles in. 

“The crossings were partially reopened, so some aid is coming in — food, water, and medicine — but only a small amount compared to the huge need,” says Intercept contributor Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi. “People are surviving, but every day it is still a struggle.”

“There is a pause in the bombing, and I say 'a pause' because there are still people being killed,” says James Zogby, the president and co-founder of the Arab American Institute.

This week on the Intercept Briefing, we hear from poet and writer Al-Wawi about what it’s been like in Gaza over the first few days of the ceasefire. Then reporter and host Jonah Valdez speaks to Zogby who, along with a delegation of Palestinian Americans, are meeting with members of Congress to ensure the current ceasefire holds and to push for an arms embargo on Israel.

“We were challenging members of Congress, not just on ending the weapons supplies to Israel because they've so abused them — in violation of U.S. and international law — but also to consider what are the needs of those who remain behind, the millions of Palestinians still in Gaza,” says Zogby. 

Valdez and Zogby dig into the details — or lack thereof — in Trump’s plan, how Israel is already breaking the ceasefire agreement, takeaways from past efforts to broker peace through the decades, and how the American public can continue pushing lawmakers to achieve lasting peace, healing, and reconstruction that benefits Palestinians. 

“Nothing's going to happen on the Israeli side in terms of concessions, unless there's a threat of punishment coming from the U.S. or the international community,” says Zogby. “That's what happened during Oslo [Accords]: The U.S. let Israel get away with murder, and they just kept doing it. If Donald Trump lets them do the same thing — and I fully expect that he probably will — then I don't expect this to move toward completion.”

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We're excited to share a new podcast from The Intercept called Collateral Damage. The investigative series examines the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself. Hosted by Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years, each episode takes an in-depth look at someone who was unjustly killed in the drug war. This is Episode One: Dirty Business.

In 2006, a 92-year-old Atlanta woman was gunned down in her own home by police during a drug raid. The police initially claimed the woman was a marijuana dealer who fired a gun at them. The story might have ended there. But an informant bravely came forward to set the record straight. Subsequent investigations and reports revealed that the police had raided the wrong home, killed an innocent woman, then planted marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake.

In the ensuing months, we’d learn that the Atlanta Police Department’s narcotics unit routinely conducted mistaken raids on terrified people. The problem was driven by perverse federal, state, and local financial incentives that pushed cops to take shortcuts in procuring warrants for drug raids in order to boost their arrest and seizure statistics. Most of those incentives are still in place today.

The raids haven’t stopped. And neither have the deaths.

Subscribe and listen to the full series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. New episodes every Wednesday.

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The United States has executed 21 people over the last month in targeted drone strikes off the coast of Venezuela. The Trump administration has so far authorized at least four strikes against people it claims are suspected “narco-terrorists.”

The strikes mark a dark shift in the administration’s approach to what it’s framing as an international drug war — one it’s waging without congressional oversight.

“There actually could be more strikes,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Turse joins host Akela Lacy and investigative journalist Radley Balko to discuss how the administration is laying the groundwork to justify extrajudicial killings abroad and possibly at home.

The Trump administration’s claims that it’s going after high-level drug kingpins don’t hold water, Turse says. “Trump is killing civilians because he 'suspects' that they're smuggling drugs. Experts that I talk to say this is illegal. Former government lawyers, experts on the laws of war, they say it's outright murder.” 

Trump has repeated claims, without evidence, that a combination of immigration and drug trafficking is driving crime in the United States. It’s part of a story Trump has crafted: The U.S. and the international community are under siege, and it’s his job to stop it — whether by executing fishermen or deploying the National Guard on his own people. And while the latest turn toward extrajudicial killings is cause for alarm, it’s also more of the same, says Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has covered the drug war for two decades and host of the new Intercept podcast, Collateral Damage. 

“The notion of collateral damage is just that: this very idea that, when you're in war, there are some who can be sacrificed because we have this greater cause that we have to win or this threat we have to overcome. And these people that are being killed in these incidents, they're collateral damage from the perspective of the U.S. government because Trump clearly doesn't care,” Balko says.

“There are a lot of parallels between what Trump is doing with immigration now and what we saw during the 1980s with the drug war. There was an effort to bring the military in,” Balko says. “This idea that Reagan declared illicit drugs a national security threat — just like Trump has done with immigration, with migrants — this idea that we're facing this threat that is so existential and so dangerous that we have to take these extraconstitutional measures, this is a playbook that we've seen before.”

Correction: In the episode, it is erroneously stated that the conversation took place on Wednesday, October 10; it was recorded on Wednesday, October 8.

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The federal government shut down on Wednesday as President Donald Trump threatened mass federal layoffs. Republicans are blaming Democrats for the shutdown, while Democrats are refusing to support a Republican spending bill without guarantees to extend Obamacare provisions set to expire and reverse GOP health care cuts earlier this year.

“Democrats are ... trying to reverse some of the cuts from the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' that was passed earlier this year to Medicaid,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. “So what Democrats are really trying to message here is that they're fighting for health care, both to reverse some of these Medicaid cuts and also to ensure that the Affordable Care Act subsidies continue.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks to Washington about the government shutdown and the impact it will have on public services, including essential services and federal workers.

We’re also following a federal court case where an appointee of Ronald Reagan blasted the Trump administration for unlawfully targeting pro-Palestine students for protected speech. 

“It’s a historic ruling that rightly affirms that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. just as it protects citizens,” says Ramya Krishnan, lecturer at Columbia University Law School and senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented plaintiffs in the case. “And if free speech means anything in this country, it means the government can't lock you up simply because it disagrees with your political views.”

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In the early hours of Wednesday morning, drones attacked a fleet of small boats bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Global Sumud Flotilla, as it’s known, is the latest group attempting to break Israel’s siege on Gaza to deliver food and medical supplies.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks to Tommy Marcus, who goes by Quentin Quarantino on Instagram, about the convoy enduring attacks on international waters as volunteers remain resolved to continue their mission to deliver aid to Gaza.

“It's pretty jarring. I'm not going to lie. I'd love to put on this really tough, confident face and say I’m totally fearless. But I'm just a normal guy, and I'd expect and hope to live past 30,” says Marcus, who is among the roughly 500 volunteers in the convoy from 45 different countries. He adds, “There is truly no way to deter us, I suppose unless they kill us. But let's hope that doesn't happen.”

Diana Buttu, the former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization and an analyst on issues related to Palestine and Israel, says Israel’s blockade of all entrances to the Gaza Strip is illegal and that “Israel's attacks on these flotillas are similarly illegal.” Uhl spoke to the Palestinian human rights lawyer about Israel escalating strikes on Gaza as the U.N. met this week and more Western countries recognize the Palestinian state — a gesture she calls hollow.

“This is an American Israeli genocide,” says Buttu. Donald Trump “could have easily ended this, but he's choosing not to.”

“Everyone joined this mission because they're so horrified by the genocide unfolding in Gaza and also the inaction of all of our governments around the world," says Marcus.

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.  

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In the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, conservatives have moved quickly to consolidate power and attack their political enemies, whose relative impotence and penchant for capitulation to power and decorum have been on full display this week.

"You have these right-wing forces that smell blood, they smell weakness, and they're going after everyone who doesn't comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning," said Adam H. Johnson, a media analyst and co-host of the “Citations Needed” podcast. 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Johnson about the White House's weaponization of Kirk's death and the broader rightward tilt of the media ecosystem.

"I think what they're doing in part [is] to make it very, very difficult for Democrats to ever beat Republicans. If you gut their media, if you gut their nonprofits, if you snuff out any kind of dissent, if you punish people at the workplace and dox them,” says Johnson. “They're basically trying to make 9/10 the new 9/11. Obviously the scope is different, but in terms of the sort of emotion, the shock. Obviously it was on video, which adds to this extra layer of psychology that's being exploited. They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they've long wanted to jam in.”

Johnson also noted that part of what we're witnessing with the increasing alignment between corporate media and Trump is the end of the "veneer" of liberalism among the billionaire class.

"You have this increasingly postmodern lack of a need for this liberal patina, this kind of veneer of universalism, and everything is just about the exercise of raw power, the exercise of pure racist propaganda," he said. "So yeah, things are bad. But I think what we've learned is that they can get worse." 

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After the fatal shooting of right-wing personality Charlie Kirk on Wednesday afternoon, the rhetoric on the right quickly escalated. Influential voices on social media declared war on the left, despite the absence of any knowledge about the suspect or their motive at the time. 

President Donald Trump made a formal address where he pledged to go after the “radical left.” 

“We are seeing language weaponized so swiftly,” says Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard.  

“I think the Trump administration has a clear track record at this point of taking these little chips that they can leverage to induce state repression and encroach on civil liberties,” says Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lennard and Breland about the implications of Kirk’s killing and how we think about political violence in the U.S. 

“We already know that whoever it does turn out to be, we are living in a moment with an authoritarian government that will weaponize this moment either way,” says Lennard. “This is about finding any opportunity to further escalate the white nationalist project.”

“I worry that his assassination is a progression toward something darker in which a wider group of people are considered to be targets for political violence,” says Breland. “And I don't think that the rhetoric that's coming out right now is doing anything to stop it or off-ramp us on this dark path.”

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The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Another government shutdown. The U.S. military shooting down a boat. The Centers for Disease Control is in turmoil just ahead of flu season. And where in the world will the National Guard go next? 

This is the world Congress returned to this week. If your head is spinning, you’re not the only one. This week on The Intercept Briefing, we break it all down with host Akela Lacy and politics reporters Jessica Washington and Matt Sledge. 

“The biggest thing hanging over everybody is this looming shutdown,” says Sledge. Congress needs to negotiate a budget extension before a potential October 1 shutdown. And, as Sledge notes, there are a handful of expected fights this session that could hamstring Congress. “There are a million other things happening on Capitol Hill. There's a big defense bill working its way through the House and Senate. And then there’s this whole Epstein situation,” he says, “which threatens to derail everything else.”

On Wednesday morning, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-KY, and Ro Khanna, D-CA, held a press conference with Epstein’s victims, where they announced a bill to force a vote to release the full Department of Justice investigation into the late Jeffrey Epstein.

“Democrats are saying, well, this is something we should do regardless, it is very clearly also a political issue in the sense that Trump has a real weakness with his base,” says Washington. “Democrats perhaps were slow to understand how much of a political liability this was for Trump. But they’re waking up, and this does very clearly seem to be an issue that is, if not partisan — obviously we're seeing Republicans join in as well — deeply political in nature.”

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Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens.

The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide.

Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels.

“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It's an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.”

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